• Game: MiHoYo's Genshin Impact
• Release Month: September.
• Quick Look: Here.
• Started: 18/12.
• Completed: ???.

I'll preface this final entry in this year's Go! Go! GOTY! with two facts that everyone who's booted up this game on a whim already knows: Genshin Impact is both a lot, and it is far from finished. That isn't to say that it's filled with bugs or is terribly unstable (though it can be a bit frame-y on a core PS4), just that the developers have big plans for the rest of the game's content that will take a long time - and many microtransactions from a dedicated fanbase - to transpire. Right now, the game has two of what appears to be seven planned landmasses: the vaguely medieval European nation of Mondstadt, which focuses on the Wind element; and the more explicitly Chinese region of Liyue, which uses the Geo (or Earth) element. The other five nations will presumably all have their own elemental focus as well, and there's been a few hints via lore references and foreign NPCs as to what may lie in store. Despite being only 2/7ths done as of writing, what currently exists in the game still presents a significant amount of content: easily 50-100 hours of exploration and tailored missions, not including the daily tasks and dungeon instances. I've spent the better part of the last week just futzing around Mondstadt and completing its storyline. (Liyue may have to wait until next year, as I've still got one more 2020 game I want to fit in before Jan 1st.)

I should first assuage those concerned about the game's F2P and "gacha" aspects, as I was (and am): the game doesn't require that you engage with any of it at all, or at least during the first "chapter" set in Mondstadt. The purpose of the game's gacha system is to earn additional characters for your party, ideally those that have elemental coverage you're currently lacking (as intimated above, there are seven types in total, and many are used for puzzles in addition to being effective against certain foes or in certain environments). However, you are given three extra characters in addition to your player-named avatar as part of the story early on, giving you a team capable of wind, ice, fire, and electricity. The introductory gacha bundle guarantees you a geo character also, and you'll be given so much premium currency for free as part of the game's progression that you'll get more than a few gachapon rolls "on the house." The five-star characters and gear will of course require more luck and investment, either gleaned from a lot of grinding or a transfusion of real money, but they aren't strictly necessary except perhaps for the truly high-level stuff. I've been able to make consistent progress without these "pay-to-win" boons, though it took some figuring out of the game's unusual systems to get there.

There's two major aspects to how Genshin Impact's progression operates that I needed to suss out before the game started to click. The first is how experience works, which is applied to character growth as well as growth of weapons and accessories (you have five types of the latter to equip, so it's an involved system). Instead of earning a lot of XP from quests and killing monsters - you earn peanuts from both, in fact - you acquire plenty of XP-boosting items as rewards. The idea here, I believe, is that it gives players full control over who and what they want to prioritize the development thereof: if you've just picked up a rare piece of equipment, or an interesting new character you're motivated to use, you can save all these XP-boosters to catch them up to your current party quickly rather than be forced to drag them into high-level areas so they can siphon the needed XP from extended grinding sessions. Weaker items can be consumed as XP too, and identical weapon drops can be used to "refine" your current gear: this improves the weapon's passive bonus, such as a boost to elemental damage. (If you get an extra version of a character from the gacha system, meanwhile, you'll earn rare items that unlock new skills for them as well as some premium currency back.) This approach to XP is not an intuitive system, but it's one that now makes a lot of sense in retrospect.

The other major aspect is the game's "Adventure Rank": this works similar to Warframe's Mastery Rank, in that it's a gauge of the player's progress themselves rather than any single character's, and that progression not only leads to rewards for every new tier reached but occasionally whole new features will open up. The game's daily challenges, its timer-based "expedition" mode, or its multiplayer co-op system, for instance, all first require a relatively high Adventure Rank to access. Adventure Rank also unlocks new items in stores, new cooking and alchemy recipes to learn, new dungeons to tackle, new story missions to pursue, and eventually improves "World Rank": a system whereby all the world's monsters and treasures level up to be more competitive to your higher level party. If the game felt a bit rudimentary from the offset, it's only because it was waiting to mete out many of its features until I was ready.

The only information I knew about Genshin Impact going in was that it had a F2P economy - being free was a major part of my decision to include it here, after all - and it cribbed a lot of its mechanics from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. To that second point, the game is flagrant in its borrowing; really the only BotW traits not to carry over are the more controversial aspects, like weapon degradation and weather effects having detrimental effects to climbing and walking around wearing metal (though it may just be a matter of time until all that's included too, since the game is being updated constantly). Your character can climb almost any surface, though not when indoors, and the overworld is filled with incidental collectibles and treasures, many of which require a little environmental puzzle to solve or judicious use of "Wind Gliders" from a higher elevation to reach. Combat is similar enough also: it's all real-time and the environment plays a role via the game's elemental system - if you hit enemies with electricity magic while they're standing in water, for instance, it does more damage and spreads around to nearby foes. It feels a bit like a combination of BotW's use of the environment and the more in-depth manner that elements and the environment combine in tactical RPGs like Divinity: Original Sin or Final Fantasy Tactics. I've had to get used to quickly switching between characters to apply combined elemental effects: they tend to do a lot more damage in tandem than individually.

I feel like I could expatiate on this game's mechanics all day, as it is surprisingly elaborate for a free action-RPG, but I should probably get around to whether or not I actually like the game. I do. I think it's fantastic, one of the most confident action-RPGs to show up in a long while (since maybe Ys VIII and Xenoblade 2 from 2017) and it's ludicrous how much of its vast content can be accessed almost immediately, without engaging with its F2P economy or a huge amount of grinding and wait times for things to be built. I can just run around the world solving puzzles to find treasure chests, or reaching floating collectibles that can be exchanged for a boost to stamina (still very important, as it was in BotW), or diving into one of the game's many dungeons each with their own battles and puzzles to overcome, or tinker around in the menus to power up my gear and customize my growing team of heroes. I eventually hit a cash-related wall in Warframe despite enjoying its faster-paced mobility and character variety, and so I'm still anxiously anticipating that other shoe to drop in Genshin Impact also, but for now I'm having a grand old time just indulging in open-world collectathon nonsense and slowly figuring out its quirks and systems. I even don't mind Paimon too much, mostly. (And for whatever it's worth, Lisa's my current favorite. Early days yet though.)

GOTY Verdict: Hard to say. It's not finished yet, and I'm not inclined to evaluate a game until it is, but it deserves some sort of special credit since it's one of the best games I've played this year.

(LAST MINUTE EDIT: Typically, they're adding the third landmass in a matter of hours, just as I put a cap on the playthrough and this review. Huh. It looks kinda snowy?)

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• Game: Size Five's Lair of the Clockwork God
• Release Month: February.
• Quick Look: N/A.
• Started: 16/12.
• Completed: 17/12.

I've had quite a bit of drama with this one: first I had to disqualify it from this feature because I couldn't get the PC version to run properly, tossing a mea culpa in the "Welcome to Go! Go! GOTY!" type staging area linked at the bottom there, and then it suddenly dropped in price to something very reasonable on the Switch and suddenly manflesh was back on the menu, as it were. Lair of the Clockwork God, to introduce it for the first time again, is the newest entry in a series of adventure games that occurred just prior of the 2010s Indie boom and featured creators Ben Ward and Dan Marshall as what I can only assume are surlier and less morally restrained versions of themselves. The first two games, Ben There, Dan That! and Time Gentlemen, Please!, were pure point-and-click adventure games: affectionate pastiches of the glorious '90s no-death LucasFilm era of examining objects, picking them up, and using them on other objects.

Lair of the Clockwork God is a bit different. Dan, the smaller of the two, has decided that he'd prefer to get in on the melancholy Indie puzzle-platformer racket, eschewing inventories and talking for collectibles and precise jumping controls. Ben, who is steadfast in not leaving his comfort zone of adventure gaming and its assorted hoary paraphernalia, rejects any notion of letting his feet leave the ground and will proceed with pointing and clicking as per usual, thank you very much. This creates a dichotomy of gameplay logistics between the two, though as before they must still work together to make any progress. The story is some deliberate nonsense about all the Apocalypses happening at once and the duo teaching a godlike mechanical entity human emotions to restore its empathy towards mankind before it will deign to put a stop to the world's imminent annihilation. It adroitly works as a narrative framing device for a series of vignettes and exploration sequences across disparate environments: some long and involved, requiring both partners to shift their weight, while others exist as brief one-off jokes or are exclusive to one character's set of skills while the other sits it out and snarks from the sidelines.

Dan's sections, as the would-be platformer hero, tend to involve a lot of tricky sequences where he hops between disappearing blocks and under lasers as they blink on and off; it's nothing particularly new or exciting, and while a lot of jokes are made at the genre's expense the platforming is also played relatively straight as a considerable portion of the game's content. Ben, meanwhile, has a point-and-click interface similar to the streamlined one introduced in Monkey Island 3 where most of the offered functions are purely contextual besides the universal "look at" and "use with inventory item." Ben cannot (or rather, refuses to) jump or drop even short distances, so much of the time Dan has to push blocks around or activate lifts to get Ben over to hotspots he can interact with, eventually allowing him to piggyback at the cost of a smaller jump. Later on, the game provides a number of different conveniences and upgrades for one or both of the protagonists: Ben can mix inventory items to craft platforming gear for Dan, for instance, the first of which are a pair of gas-producing shoes that allow for double-jumps.

The greatest strength of the original Ben and Dan games was the comedy: it's not easy being funny in a video game, and being funny about video games in a fourth-wall-breaking sense is even tougher, yet these two knuckleheads are consistently amusing throughout their whole series, with Lair of the Clockwork God a particular highlight. It helps that the Indie gaming satire is honed to an edge a Ginsu would covet, riffing on the past decade of Indie development that didn't quite pass the duo by (as far as I know, they've each been working independently on other projects since Time Gentlemen, Please!). So you'll get the expected (and some unexpected) jokes about "time-saver" microtransactions, pretentious walking simulator dialogue, "crafting," middleware companies, corporate sponsorship, loss.jpg, and the sheer antipathy most players feel towards sliding block puzzles. Yet despite plumbing these tired veins, the quality level of the humor is high throughout, balancing the persistent disdainful commentary (mostly from Ben, since this newfangled Indie Darling scene is something he wants nothing to do with) with physical comedy, really dumb puns, weaponized misanthropy, Gordian knot-style solutions to problems, and one unfortunately relatable sequence where the pair contend with how old everything makes them feel after convincing a judgemental social media feed full of slang they don't recognize to allow them into a nightclub. The writing is trenchant throughout, albeit very British; expect some colloquialisms and other mild culture shock if playing from outside the UK.

I wrote somewhere, now no doubt deleted, that Lair of the Clockwork God feels like this year's Horace. Both are evident passion projects that took their UK-based developers some time to put together, at least conceptually. Both balance exceedingly tough platforming (though there's a difficulty slider for that aspect in LotCG; there's a great deal of accessibility options, in fact) with some story-heavy interludes and puzzles. Both have narratives that twist and turn in ways almost impossible to predict, throwing you into one bizarre situation after another. Both even have incongruous 3D first-person sequences. And in both cases, while the action gameplay wasn't perfect, each has brilliantly witty writing, no shortage of inventive ideas, and a mostly cohesive and involved story that made it worth seeking out and playing regardless. I had a great time with this one, and it's killing me that I'm not allowed to spoil half the goofs to explain why.

GOTY Verdict: Right near the top of the list, going mano-a-mano with Paradise Killer for the number three slot. Gotta figure out if idiosyncrasy trumps dick jokes.

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• Game: Vanripper's Helltaker
• Release Month: May.
• Quick Look: N/A.
• Started: 15/12.
• Completed: 15/12.

There was a small stir on the gaming zones of the social media a few months back where everyone was suddenly getting thirsty for demon girls. It soon became apparent that the culprit at the center of it all was a freeware Steam game named Helltaker, following a similar set of circumstances that put a newly added feature in a relatively anodyne New Super Mario Bros. U Switch remake at the heart of an equally horny fanart catastrophe. Helltaker's a brief puzzle game that's perhaps best suited for mobile devices (it has that kind of style to it), but notable enough beyond its central conceit of obtaining a "demon girl harem" to be worth reviewing for this feature.

Helltaker is a specific sort of puzzle game I've referred to in the past (actually never) as the "perfect path deducer". That is, you're given a limited number of moves to complete a map, working your way from one point to another, and going over this limit will instantly end the attempt and start you over. These maps are invariably a grid of obstacles to overcome, from rocks to skeletal goons to spike traps. Rocks need to be pushed out the way (and regularly form inconvenient barriers), skeletal goons are also pushed out of the way but can be eliminated if shoved against a wall, and spike traps simply remove two steps from your limit rather than one though can be safely walked upon during their "off" state (they alternate every step). This is the basis of the first eight levels of the game, with the ninth and final switching the format to a more reflex-intensive real-time boss battle.

However, there is one more obstacle to overcome before a level is complete: you have to convince the comely demon girl at the end to join your harem, via a very dating-sim-like multiple choice prompt. Failure to convince them usually has them clawing your head off, which naturally proves as fatal as failing to reach them in the first place. The developers made sure to give each of these infernal paramours enough of a distinct personality, sharp "business casual" fashion sense, and distinct role in Hell's operation, which may have spawned the whole demon waifu business that spread out over the internet for a brief but prurient moment in time. Honestly, this all thematically dovetails with the allure of the immortal genocidal cult leaders of Paradise Killer also, which proves if nothing else that the internet can stan anything, even pure evil, if it's sexy enough.

Beyond all that, the game's about an hour long and I'm not going to spoil the puzzles or the encounters, and the game's still free on Steam if you're curious yourselves. I believe there's an option to skip puzzles if they turn out to be too tough (I'll admit to spending close to 15 minutes on the eighth stage, and the ninth sure wasn't easy either) so it's fairly accessible. A pleasant freebie surprise, much like Doki Doki Literature Club was for 2017. Just, uh, maybe put SafeSearch on if you decide to go Googling for more information (or don't; no yucking anyone's yums here).

GOTY Verdict: It's cute so it's in the running, but I don't fancy its chances in the long-term.

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• Game: Atmos Games's Neversong
• Release Month: May*.
• Quick Look: N/A.
• Started: 14/12.
• Completed: 14/12.

In the Devil's Kiss review, the second in this year's season of Go! Go! GOTY!, I talked about how veteran game parodiérs Dan Marshall and Ben Ward based their follow-up game Lair of the Clockwork God - temporarily removed from my itinerary, but recently added back in - on the premise that the Indie gaming scene is predominantly stacked with lugubrious and artistically aspirational puzzle-platformer games, a vogue started at the tail end of the '00s with the likes of Braid and several others. That trend has all but fizzled out by 2020, to what I imagine is some chagrin to Dan and Ben who probably wrote Lair of the Clockwork God's outline far earlier when the joke was still relevant. Turns out people actually are still making them though: Neversong is absolutely that type of game for better or worse, filled with momentum- and timing-based jumping puzzles and challenging boss fights that all act as the backdrop to one little orphan's quest to recover his beloved girlfriend from the sinister wraith Dr. Smile, and what might actually be happening beneath this familiar set-up.

Neversong is a quasi-sequel/reboot to a Flash game named Coma that creator Thomas Brush put together in his spare time as a student in 2010. He followed that up with the long-in-development Once Upon a Coma, which eventually morphed to become Neversong. Knowing that this game was a remake of a 2010 project made more sense in retrospect. Sadly, in the process of learning more about the source of the game after completing it (my usual practice, since I like to avoid spoilers whenever possible) I also found out that Neversong is actually a 2019 game: it launched on PS4 on the Halloween of last year. However, I'm counting it anyway because A) its European PS4 debut wasn't until the July of this year, which was months after its worldwide iOS and Steam launches in May, and B) I've already completed it so I might as well talk about it. I'll be sure to add an asterisk to it once I get around to my GOTY list.

So, Neversong. It's nothing we've not seen before, but in a thematic way I think that works in the game's favor: as a game led by a child surrounded solely by other children in a vaguely mid-20th century rural setting (the date gets a little murky for reasons that become clear later) one of the main themes is the doubled-edged sword that is nostalgia and the dangers that dwelling too much in the past can cause. Just like how protagonist Peet's adventures in his suddenly topsy-turvy hometown belies a deeper adult trauma at its core, being ten years out from the melancholy puzzle-platformer fad has made it the newest of video game genres to feel wistful about. (At least, I'm assuming that was a part of its successful Kickstarter push, though other factors - the game's distinctive, gothic, Edward Gorey-esque look and Brush's profile as the creator of Indie adventure hit Pinstripe - certainly contributed also.) The game's progress is demarcated by new songs obtained from bosses that, when played on the heroine's home piano, open up chests that contain new traversal items that allow Peet to explore more of the surrounding countryside. Despite this item-based progression system though, the game is markedly not an explormer: in fact, it's very linear barring a few collectibles you might want to backtrack for, largely for the sake of keeping its narrative trucking along. The other kids lend their personal takes on Peet's progress, but will often contribute in other ways: sometimes by giving him hints on how to complete upcoming, or being a component of those puzzles themselves. A few are there to give you fetch quests to complete, while others exist as eccentric red herrings to give the world a little more personality. I bring them up because the final act does something of interest to this little gang of yours, paying off the investment the player puts in learning their names and quirks early on.

Gameplay-wise, I was often at odds with Neversong, though the blame lies once again with my own inadequate hardware (specifically my PC, though the "hardware" that lives in my head isn't necessarily off the hook). I've noticed certain brands of game creator software really freak out if you don't have the adequate GPU chops to consistently run a game at its desired framerate, with certain physics-y objects like the climb-able and swing-able vines glitching into outer space and stymieing your progress until they eventually calm down or the player is forced to reload their last save. The lag introduced by these framerate problems also made the aforementioned momentum puzzles - the swinging on the vines as well as a skateboard that needs some run-up for larger jumps - quite unpleasant to deal with. Overall and exempt these issues, the platforming controls fine enough and I appreciated how clever some of its boss fights were, even if combat with normal enemies can be a bit mashy and unreliable. A very handy floating tool - an umbrella, naturally - would've been appreciated for the game's early jumping puzzles, though it's regrettably instead the last item in the game's progression chain.

On the whole, Neversong is every bit the type of emotionally-charged Indie puzzle-platformer that the industry has more or less moved away from in recent years. If you're still in the market for one of those, it's certainly serviceable and its peculiar artstyle, macabre sense of humor, and occasional flashes of gameplay ingenuity are additional feathers in its cap. The technical problems and some annoying puzzles towards the end meant my honeymoon period with the game concluded long before the game itself did, so I'm left mostly ambivalent about it despite those stated virtues. Ultimately: I didn't love it, but I would never say "never Neversong."

GOTY Verdict: Near the bottom of the list but not necessarily out of the running.

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• Game: Bytten Studio's Lenna's Inception
• Release Month: January.
• Quick Look: N/A.
• Started: 12/12.
• Completed: 12/12.

I feel like whenever I talk about an Indie action-adventure game clearly and purposefully built on the framework of the Legend of Zelda, I always gravitate towards my pet theory that every Indie Zelda-like emphasizes or de-emphasizes portions of the trinity, or triforce if you will, of that franchise's mix of open-world exploration, puzzle-solving, and real-time combat. However, there are also a handful of cases like Anodyne or today's game Lenna's Inception where the Zelda parallels aren't so much intended as a launching point for the developer's spin on that type of game, but instead serve as the foundation for some meta narrative trickery couched in a familiar framework.

The protagonist of the game, Lenna (though the player can rename her), is a schoolteacher in a very Zelda-like kingdom of vaguely medieval villagers and packs of slimes and other monsters roaming around just outside of civilization. Her school unexpectedly glitches into error code, trapping the kids inside, and in the process of finding a solution comes across the silent hero "Lance," wearing a familiar hooded tunic, and determines that it's her task as a teacher NPC to walk him through the tutorial so that he might save the world and restore her school. Lance then immediately croaks, and Lenna finds herself begrudgingly picking up his mantle as the world's chosen one. The plot goes through a few more twists and turns that I don't need to spoil, except to say that the data corruption - which originated elsewhere in the world by an accidental item underflow glitch, perhaps familiar to those who follow Pokémon speedruns - is an important development that the game sidelines for most of the playthrough. Beyond that element, however, the game is largely perfunctory Zelda game: there are eight dungeons, each of which concludes with a boss fight that adds to the player's max health and each contains a new traversal item or weapon Lenna needs to make progress.

One distinctive trait of the game that I've seen a few other Zelda-likes attempt, with very mixed results, is procedural generation. The world is generated anew each time you start, with the world's name also doubling as its seed. The game has a few example names for players to use if they can't think of one themselves, and it serves to reassemble the overworld, the items you obtain and in what order, and the layouts of the dungeons. However, as with most procgen projects, this only serves to make every dungeon feel the same, with similar "tiles" that you'll encounter over and over and enemy arrangements with inconsistent difficulty curves. If inputting a seed name wasn't a giveaway that the game has Rogue aspirations, the game's many potion types are initially unlabelled save for their color and consistency: a "fizzy red potion" could be anything from a heal, to increased fire resistance, to hovering or giant growth (both useful to brute force some puzzles), to many detrimental effects like poison, reversed controls, or slowness. The same is true for the many hues of tunic that the protagonist can wear, which provide a permanent version of the potion effect for as long as it's worn. The game's randomized "mini-dungeons," non-essential to progress but often containing helpful heart pieces or meteorite upgrade materials, will also have enemies under several simultaneous potion effects for a bit of variety.

The problem with Lenna's Inception as a procgen game is that there's very few monster types and dungeon tiles and so it feels like you've seen most of what the game has to offer within a few hours. It starts getting interesting again towards the end where there's a dungeon that encourages (and, in fact, requires) you to break the game and wander outside in the "out of bounds" areas, but before that it's a lot of generic randomized dungeons that suffer from procgen's intrinsic lack of creative direction. The overworld isn't all that interesting either, being built with a similar algorithm, and as far as I can tell the purpose for going the procgen route is twofold: to facilitate speedruns or harder playthroughs with additional harsh conditions (limited health, permadeath), and a "true ending" that is so obtuse and requires such specific steps that you'll almost certainly need to start over with a fresh run to see it. I'm typically not going to look fondly on a game that demands you play it several times over to get the most out of it, especially if I was already getting bored of it during the first playthrough, but I suppose I can at least see the logic of this approach. I think we're probably still a ways from implementing procgen effectively in anything other than short session run-based games like Spelunky or Hades, or games where the destination doesn't matter as much as the journey (e.g. No Man's Sky), and I wish the Indie game development sphere used it more sparingly.

I will say that the story and the meta way it factors in programming faults and bugs is kinda cool, in the same reality-busting manner that Axiom Verge tackled the explormer genre a few years back, and I appreciated quality-of-life features like the bicycle fast-travel system (which sneaks in another Pokémon reference), a NPC follower system that made fights quicker and sometimes added extra lines of dialogue to cutscenes, and a two-player mode if you wanted to take on a seed with a friend. Just taken purely as A Link to the Past ersatz it plays well enough and offers enough side-quests and interesting boss fights to take on, as long as you don't mind the long stretches of uninteresting procgen exploration in-between. I dunno, for what it's worth I liked it more than Songbringer, the last procgen Zelda-like I played.

GOTY Verdict: Hovering near the bottom of the top-ten, likely to get pushed out by next year's adjustment.

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• Game: Kaizen Game Works's Paradise Killer
• Release Month: September.
• Quick Look: N/A.
• Started: 10/12.
• Completed: 11/12.

In my bad habits, I sometimes lead my reviews with something noncommittal and inconsequential like "this game was not what I expected"; I feel like such a sentiment would be too much of a facile understatement when it comes to Kaizen Game Works's Paradise Killer, however, as it's a metaphysical murder mystery game set on an artificial island paradise pocket dimension built by immortal zealots who worship all-powerful cosmic entities. Functionally similar to something like Spike Chunsoft's Danganronpa - that is, a visual novel driven by crime scene investigations and evidence-led testimony in court - Paradise Killer also presents a surprisingly vast open-world 3D game across an island filled with trash, treasure, currency, secrets, and sometimes valuable clues to uncover. The required nature of the last item on that list makes encountering the rest mostly incidental, though there's enough worldbuilding packed into those finds to make their pursuit worthwhile.

Speaking of which, the game is not shy about throwing the player in the deep end of a particularly abyssal pool when it comes to its oblique setting and backstory. In as brief and spoiler-free as I can make it: at some point in humanity's past we found ourselves in contact with beings beyond the stars that referred to themselves as gods. After many centuries, with mankind split among the slave armies of these various cosmic entities, we were able to throw off the yoke of oppression and either slayed, imprisoned, or chased off the gods that subjugated us for so long. In its dying moments, one of these gods gifted a small faction of loyal human zealots named the Syndicate both immortality and the ability to create "island sequences": tropical-themed pocket dimensions from which they could launch attacks on the newly emancipated human race and recover the gods they had captured, whom would then be interred in pyramid tombs until their strength had recovered. A regular influx of "citizens" - humans abducted from the real world - are used as slave labor and chattel, forced to worship the Syndicate's gods to supply them with nourishing psychic energy until it was time to ritually mass-sacrifice them all and begin anew on a fresh island. In the present era, the nine-member ruling council of the Syndicate has been slaughtered to a man, and it's up to a formerly exiled Syndicate investigator named Lady Luck Dies to determine the culprit or culprits.

It's a hell of a lot to take in, and naturally you have to derive much of this information yourself from context once you begin, but Paradise Killer luxuriates in both its absurdity and its style and you either find yourself rolling along in its distinctive groove or slamming up against its alienating strangeness like a brick wall. The closest approximation of what the developers were going for, as far as I could tell, was something like Grasshopper/Goichi "Suda51" Suda's Killer is Dead, or earlier projects like Killer7 and The Silver Case. Much of Suda's telltale aesthetic and narrative flair is invoked here, including electronically modified voice clips, heavily artifacted images used for items, random asides given to philosophical musings and silly jokes, and intentionally ludicrous names germane for the game's cast of quasi-godlike immortals like former assassin Lydia Day Break or the cybernetic medic Doctor Doom Jazz. Calling a group of suspects that includes characters named The Witness To the End or One Last Kiss "a rogue's gallery" seems woefully insufficient. Like I said, though, the surrealism of the setting is something you're encouraged to let wash over you as you dig further into the comparatively grounded reasons behind the game's central murder conspiracy, with relatively quotidian motives like jealousy, long-standing animosity, past betrayals, or a desire for power and/or recognition. A group of immortals taking it easy in a series of island paradises over many millennia is bound to produce lot of skeletons in closets, or in one case (seen above) serving drinks behind a bar.

Traversing the island becomes easier with a handful of expensive upgrades, like a double-jump and an air-dash, though you obviously need to first determine the source of these upgrades and then find enough of the currency needed to buy them. Many items are placed in odd, out-of-reach locations (and there's a succinct in-game explanation as to why they're all where they are: a demon did it) and you could go nuts trying to figure out how to access them all, or grow exhausted taking detours to higher vantage points where you can hop down to them. The fast travel stations ameliorate this process to some extent, though they also require some of the game's finite currency supply to unlock and use. (Said currency are crystals made of frozen blood: the most precious resource to a group of blood cultists.) Then there's the vital upgrades to the protagonist's PDA device, which are needed to get past a lot of the locked doors across the island via a so-so hacking mini-game.

With the exception of crime scenes and certain other areas of interest, most of the map is immaterial unless you're searching for more lore or following up certain leads: to help focus the player, there's an AR mode that highlights every NPC's location so you can make a beeline towards them, and this mode also helpfully indicates when you have something new to ask them about. New revelations often create new cases to pursue, and every character has some response to your inquiries even if they're often terse and unhelpful. There's a few visual novel indulgences with these interrogations: characters have a selection of stock voice clips they'll use that may or may not be linked to what's actually in the dialogue box, a cost-saving measure common to Japanese visual novels, and the player can choose to hang out with suspects in a vaguely "social link"-esque manner for the sake of getting to know them better as well as convincing them to let some incriminating information slip. Much of both the map exploration and NPC dialogue is thus inessential, but you've no way of determining that ahead of time: any clue or hint might eventually prove valuable to your investigation, after all. Accessibility-wise the game has a host of options for those with limited sight problems, colorblindness, vertigo, motion sickness, dyslexia, or insufficient night vision to handle the game's intense day/night cycles. However, it should be stated that the game has no auto-saving and limited save opportunities: that is, you can only save the game at the aforementioned fast travel stations. There's a "mature content" filter too, but I'm not sure what it toggles; possibly the copious swearing from certain characters.

While I think the game can be a little too abstruse for its own good and that so much of its content is filler designed to lead the more OCD of us around in circles or have them running up looping apartment staircases ad nauseum, I really can't fault the game's bold sense of style or the confidence of its worldbuilding. The orange sunsets and neon pastels of its tropical streets and vistas, the sheer overwhelming personality of its setting and characters, and in particular a sterling '80s funk/"citypop"-influenced soundtrack that soon earwormed its way to the top of my list of Best Music GOTY candidates this year all lend the game an inimitable aesthetic that is sure to stick around in the old grey matter for many years to come. I'll inevitably still kvetch over the fine details when it comes to picking the best games of this year - I encountered one huge revelation about the case almost entirely by accident while running around off the beaten path, and the game suffers from some poor script editing with its many, many cases of getting its/it's and whose/who's wrong (far more than you can chalk up to typos, at least; it was more like the writers and proofers honestly didn't know the right ones to use) - but I think Paradise Killer will stand as the type of beloved cult auteur game that people will be discovering and falling in love with multiple years from now, even if it never sees any major exposure. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the more artistically-inclined of Giant Bomb's myriad guest GOTY contributors put it high on their lists, even if Giant Bomb itself won't have much to say on it (especially with Abby gone, given her proclivity for off-kilter Indie adventure games).

GOTY Verdict: Very close to the top, though not quite passing some of my heavy hitters. It's in a pretty short list of games this year I'd accept could be someone's GOTY.

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• Game: HAL Laboratory's Part Time UFO
• Release Month: October.
• Quick Look: N/A.
• Started: 8/12.
• Completed: 9/12.

Yeah, I'm technically breaking the rules again: Part Time UFO originally released on Android devices in 2017. However, this year saw its debut on a video game platform (the Switch) so it - along with Assemble With Care from earlier in this feature - qualifies for this year's GOTY, as per the rules of this site in case my own assertions were insufficient. Part Time UFO is a product from the small division of HAL Laboratory who are freed from the perpetual toil in the sugar mines needed to make Kirby games, creating instead such bite-sized portable delights as Picross 3D and the BoxBoy! series. Built for simplified touch controls, the goal of Part Time UFO is to float around as the titular alien temp worker and grab and drop objects into their appropriate locations, contingent on the current task given to you. This might involve putting vegetables on the back of a farmer's pick-up, or re-assembling a priceless statue, or angling up a JRPG mini-game's worth of fish from the ocean. Since all you need controls-wise is a single button for catch and release, and the free-floating movement, the complexity instead comes courtesy of the tasks themselves as well as some frequently tricky bonus conditions that increases your paycheck.

I tweeted about the game a few hours after starting, and I feel it concisely covers what I dislike most about the game:

In other words, almost all the puzzles involve finicky physics puzzles where a stack of unstable trash has to stay standing without running afoul of gravity or your own careless swinging around of whatever it is you might be holding. Objects plummet to the ground if they lack support, and carried objects sway as you'd expect with every movement; coupled together, it makes for a very challenging scenario (or, indeed, many consecutively with little relief) that demands a level of concentration and precision I'm not sure you're likely to get with the various distractions that come with mobile gaming. As the tweet suggests, many players might approach this game having been long acquainted with the nuances of claw-catcher arcade games: where best to hook a rounder toy, for example, or using the sides of the machine to push an object into a position where it might be caught. Nintendo themselves have had a long-running F2P arcade claw-catcher sim on the 3DS, complete with a bunny who keeps demanding more money from you (which was something of a theme for the 3DS), and I've gotten fairly good at it over the years. The claw machine concept's a compelling one, but physics-based puzzle games are usually anything but; in my estimation, unless you're playing in a raucous group or trying to entertain an easily amused child (or stream audience), physics games like Human Fall Flat or Octodad are best avoided and the same rings true for Part Time UFO.

It's not all doom and gloom. As with BoxBoy! (and Kirby, I suppose) HAL Laboratory has cornered the market on cuteness, with the heavy-lidded UFO giving off a world-weariness that is at odds with its adorable appearance and universe full of oddball characters. Little recurring jokes like an enigmatic statue with a nervous look - involved in a great deal of puzzles as a frequently-hidden bonus objective - or a master thief who poorly disguises herself as any number of background objects give the game a quirky personality, as do the range of employers that the UFO works for which include a mad scientist and a circus apparently run by the animals. The game has thirty job assignments overall (or at least the Switch port does) but expands the longevity with each job's three bonus tasks, an achievement-like set of meta challenges that might involve milestones or completing jobs in oddly specific ways (such as assembling a statue or castle upside-down), and "hard mode" versions of all the jobs that add more obstacles like a higher total of objects to balance or more distractions to deter you. The money you earn, meanwhile, goes towards a fashion store run by a genie: many of the costumes will provide additional abilities like making the claw faster or heavier objects easier to lift, though most are simply cosmetic. Needless to say, they're all very cute as well.

The wholesomeness of Part Time UFO makes it a hard game to dislike, and yet I managed to get there regardless because of how often I was forced to watch a carefully assembled pile of garbage tip over because the game's tenuous grasp of gravity had deemed it structurally unsound. Even minor comedic quirks like the way the last ten yen coin in the pay packet needed an extra shake to come out grew to become deeply annoying, as it meant the animation added an extra couple of seconds each time and I was desperate to retry the task (because I missed a condition) or move on to literally anything else. I feel the same way towards it in general that I did about the original Scribblenauts: it came out of the gate with such an inspired approach to puzzle-solving and then proceeded to craft every puzzle with the same deeply frustrating format, instead of expanding the idea as far as it could go. Later Scribblenaut games were infinitely better because they found a broader, superior application of their particular conceit of summoning items to complete objectives, and extrapolating from that experience I imagine Part Time UFO 2 won't be something I detest with all my heart. Here's hoping, eh?

GOTY Verdict: It's visually and musically cute, controls well, provides a great deal of longevity if not variety, and is chock full of kooky personality. However, in my experience at least, loathed games don't usually do so well in finalized GOTY lists.

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• Game: Mediatonic's Murder by Numbers
• Release Month: March.
• Quick Look: N/A.
• Started: 5/12.
• Completed: 8/12.

My first serious Go! Go! GOTY! contender for the GOTY list, if not the top spot, Murder by Numbers by Mediatonic is a delightful merger of picross puzzle games and a '90s-set detective procedural visual novel made in a Japanese style, specifically modelled after the likes of the Ace Attorney franchise, or possibly the Hotel Dusk duology. Disclaimer: due to it being something of the home of picross these days, I bought the Switch version of Murder by Numbers, though after learning my lesson from Picross 3D Round 2 I relied purely on the controller for filling in the grid rather than the undocked touchscreen controls.

The story of Murder by Numbers sees down-on-her-luck Hollywood actress Honor Mizrahi encounter an amnesiac robot named SCOUT, and a shocking murder at her former workplace eventually highlights both her latent talent for deduction and SCOUT's invaluable capacity for scanning and analyzing important clues and evidence. Most of this process involves SCOUT examining the local vicinity for items that might be relevant to the investigation, each of which leads to (of course) a separate picross puzzle. On the picross side of the equation, the game has a brief tutorial that explains the basics of the interface and of the "overlapping" technique - determining correct squares based on whether or not they're active whether you start the row on the left or right, a fundamental component of solving picross puzzles - before letting you loose and slowly building its way up to 15x15 grids (there is exactly one 20x15 grid, and only in the "bonus puzzles" section of the game, which makes me wonder why there weren't more). Something that occurred to me close to the end of the game is how miraculous it was that they were able to create a constant difficulty curve for the picross puzzles while building investigative stories around the objects you were finding; something I'm sure wasn't easy to pull off, at least not without some trial and error to redraw those pixel objects several times over until they made for an appropriately challenging puzzle for that specific stage of the game.

Due to its nature as a hybrid, and perhaps the developers' inexperience with either half of Murder by Numbers's make-up, there's a few fixtures common to visual novels and picross puzzles alike which aren't present here, though they are admittedly minor conveniences and the kinds of exclusion you'd only notice if you've played a lot of games from either genre. As an example on the picross side, there's a feature common to picross games where you can mark boxes rather than cross them out (to indicate there's definitely not a square there) or fill them in (to indicate there definitely is a square there) if you need a visual aid to plot possible solutions. Murder by Numbers has them too, but if you try to delete them en masse - by dragging the cursor across the whole row or column - it also deletes all the valid crosses/fills as well, which shouldn't happen. Once you've correctly (at least, by your estimation) filled in a row and can delete the no-longer-necessary guide markings by holding down the deletion button and working your way across the row, most picross games will only remove the markings if that's where you started. It's a very minor thing, but still makes guide markings less convenient to use. Likewise, as a visual novel, Murder by Numbers lacks any kind of "log" feature: an ability to see previous lines of dialogue if you clicked past them too fast. That's more than possible due to the way that Murder by Numbers, when dealing with situations where one character interrupts another, will have the first character's dialogue box interrupted in real-time without the player needing to hit the button to proceed to the next line. This makes it both annoyingly easy to miss the end of the interrupted dialogue, and easy to accidentally skip the interrupter's dialogue as you click the "next dialogue" button the moment it pops up unexpectedly. This is distinct from visual novels which will generally indicate an interruption with an en-dash at the end of the first dialogue box, but still hangs on it until the player is ready to read on. Again, it's worth reiterating that these faults don't drag the game down much at all and that developers that create picross games (like Jupiter) or visual novels (like 5pb.) have been working in those spheres since forever, and are often geared towards making nothing but them: to expect the same level of expert proficiency from a novice developer looking to create something distinct and breezily fun isn't all that fair, but I'm pointing it out anyway because I'm always cranky in December I guess.

Murder by Numbers is also part of a small but growing movement in the Indie scene towards stronger LGBTQ+ representation in games, dovetailing the anecdotes of drag queens and Honor's best friend and flamboyantly out hairdresser K.C. with SCOUT's own voyage of self-discovery, including his confusion over whether or not he has a gender identity as a robot. It's all wholesome and cute and feels intended to introduce audiences to these worlds in much the same way the Ace Attorney games took steps to explain the more obtuse inner-workings of, say, filming TV shows or spirit channeling to its frequently bemused Judge character. The writing in Murder by Numbers is uniformly excellent for that matter, even if the whodunnit aspect can feel a little too perfunctory; it's amazing how quickly Honor can put together a solid explanation of the culprit and how they did it after SCOUT identifies half a dozen random objects sitting around the crime scene. The writing and themes are also much more, well, I might say "mature" compared to Ace Attorney - which I only keep bringing up because Murder by Numbers is so obviously riffing on it (to the extent that it brings in original AA and Ghost Trick composer Masakazu Sugimori for the music) - in how it covers difficult or nuanced topics, in particular the slimy, manipulative way that Honor's ex-husband tries to worm his way back into her life after closely controlling it for most of their marriage. That isn't to say Murder by Numbers doesn't also ably balance its more serious moments - a whooooole lot of dead bodies - with plenty of levity too, especially with SCOUT's terrible puns and Honor's half-baked explanations to her over-protective cop associate for why she put herself in harm's way again. I enjoyed it all, even if much of it only exists to get you to the next picross puzzle. Speaking of which, anyone worried there wouldn't be enough picross puzzles in a game splitting its focus between it and adventure gaming needn't be worried: not only is the story replete with puzzles everywhere you turn, but there's a whole bonus section dedicated to about 70 extra puzzles that exist irrespective of the main story progression. If I complete a picross game and don't want to see another picross for at least three months, then I'm satisfied it had enough of them - that was definitely the case for Murder by Numbers.

Overall, I think Murder by Numbers is probably too small, too niche, and arrived too early in the year for it to see any serious GOTY consideration (not that Mediatonic will mind too much: they also made Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout this year, which has something of a higher profile), but I consider it a very effective blend of two disparate genre bases that's really only missing one additional coat of polish. If you're a fan of both stated genres, or a fan of one who is curious about the other and looking for a good entry-level gateway, then this game should serve you well.

GOTY Verdict: Absolutely worthy. Hovering around the middle of my list at the present, though might eventually get bumped off the top ten once I've caught up with more of 2020's bigger games in years to come.

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I've got a busy month ahead with GOTY-related features, but nothing stops the Indie Game of the Week. I picked out HopFrog's Forager because it's an excellent example of an undemanding podcast game: something I can half-heartedly chip away at while doing other things. An effective crystallization of survival games and idle clickers framed in a pleasantly anodyne top-down 16-bit pixel aesthetic, Forager is all about making gauges grow and inventory numbers get bigger as you forage and mine across an ever-expanding landmass with regenerating resources. The game has a progression structure, but lacks any overarching goals: rather, the player works towards short-term benefits at all times, figuring out where best to next expand their universe. Do they earn the money needed to add another island to their archipelago? Earn XP through busywork to unlock some new buildings or perks? Work towards the next upgrade for their pickaxe (faster resource acquisition) or shovel (better buried loot) or backpack (more inventory space)? Spend a few moments scouring the furthest points of their world for any rare resource nodes that may have popped in the meantime? Contribute valuable goods to their local museum to move ever closer to a special prize? Remodel an island to an attractive if immaterial home base, beautifying the surrounding area with paths, statues, and apiaries?

With no story beats to follow and no real conclusion in sight, it's entirely up to the player how deep they wish to get into Forager's systems and progression, not dissimilar to survival/crafting forebears like Minecraft and Terraria. One area where it differs is in how the player can eventually start building resource generators that work automatically and endlessly to increase the player's assets in the background, which is where the idle clicker comparisons come in. I've been building a few extra "banks" - structures whose entire purpose is to slowly generate money - so I can purchase new landmasses sooner, and the most recent expansions have introduced new biomes (one looks like a desert and another a spooky graveyard, each popping resources unique to them), and now I'm looking at the means of rebooting some lapsed item upgrade trees now that I have access to the uncommon materials they need. Forager's gameplay has a simple loop, but a compelling one: it ensures there's always something to chase after, and will let you pin any recipe to your HUD to make the next destination easier to reach, until (one assumes) you eventually run out of things to find, build, or possess.

Experience and levelling plays a major part of the game's progression also: unlocking new structures to create, or new resources to procure, or new abilities that makes certain aspects of the game either easier or more efficient are all tied to the player's skill tree. This skill tree starts with four general quadrants: foraging, for living off the fat of the land; economy, for increasing your cash flow one way or another; industry, for building ever more elaborate structures for intermediary and advanced resources like steel or leather; and magic, which is a miscellaneous group of combat and fantastical perks. As level-ups get further apart as the XP requirement continues to inflate, the wide variety of choices available inspire that much more indecision: a passive buff to damage or increased wealth from mining might have to be temporarily put aside for the sake of new structures to build, since the latter is where you're likely to make big strides in what you can make.

For as much as I'm happily trapped in Forager's Skinner box, the game is not without some fundamental issues. Chief of which is a highly unstable framerate that probably started as a small issue and ballooned as the developer continued to add more content and polished the visual effects and graphics of what was already there. Most of the time the game will be stuck in something under 30fps (the in-game FPS counter won't actually go under 30, I assume as some sort of placatory placebo, but given the molasses-like pace it's clearly struggling to hit double-digits) while you'll see very brief windows of what 60fps looks like: just enough of a taste to make you long for the Elysium you're missing out on. This doesn't even seem to be a problem distinct to my all-too-common under-performing system woes; many of the Forager fan boards on Reddit and Steam suggest others are facing the same issues, all of whom with considerably more powerful rigs that should handle a 16-bit throwback Indie no problem. It sounds like it's even affecting the console ports. I'm not sure if I was just unfortunate to discover the game while it's in the midst of a temporary setback, or if this is a deeply ingrained issue relating to feature creep that, at this juncture, the developer has no plans or clues on how to fix. Either way, it's been highly detrimental to the playthrough, though not quite a dealbreaker just yet: after all, the game doesn't demand any serious skill or timing to its combat, which is where an erratic framerate would be a serious downer. Minor annoyances also include the usual compulsory (though are they?) survival sim elements like a dwindling hunger/energy meter that needs regular food to ameliorate and a strict inventory limit that you can address with certain upgrades.

I think with these resource-gathering survival sims you're either in on their endless looping systems or you're out, the latter possibly more inclined towards something with a narrative arc or meaningful progression that guarantees an eventual end state (or, perhaps, the idea of just collecting things ad infinitum doesn't appeal). For those inclined towards said sims, Forager is one of the purest versions of it I've encountered: there's barely any conflict besides the occasional dumbass monster; no multiplayer with groups vying for a limited pool of goods or lording their megalithic creations over the neophyte peons beating sticks and rocks together; everything regenerates quickly even if certain rare ores and plants might take a little longer and pop up further afield; and the game has a relaxed, unhurried vibe to it that implicitly encourages you to approach its smorgasbord of systems in any pace or order you wish. It is, in so many words and to circle back around to the start, a perfect podcast game - provided said podcast is being broadcast out of something other than your browser, since that might sap the framerate even further.

Rating: 3 out of 5.

• Game: Size Five Games's Devil's Kiss
• Release Month: February.
• Quick Look: N/A.
• Started: 03/12.
• Completed: 03/12.

Devil's Kiss is a visual novel that is about twenty minutes long and has one achievement called "Basically Read a Book". It is not so much a commercial product (though you can buy it separately) but an elaborate Ren'Py joke included with the purchase of the actual next game on my list, Ben Ward and Dan Marshall's Lair of the Clockwork God. If those names sound vaguely familiar, it's because they made a couple of point-and-click adventure games more than a decade ago starring self-effacing facsimiles of themselves: Ben There, Dan That! and Time Gentlemen, Please! (Dan has since gone on to make a few other games, notably The Swindle from 2015, and I'm sure Ben's been busy also.) These two games appealed to me at the time not only because they were deeply referential, of '90s adventure games and trashy British pop culture alike, but because the two leads had a sharp comedic voice in a medium that is typically, and tragically, lacking for same. Their long awaited third game in their little trilogy finally landed at the start of the year, ironically settling on "the end of the world" as humorous subject matter shortly before Covid made it all too real.

However, I'll get to the Clockwork God and where he might be residing in a future update. Devil's Kiss is more or less a bonus prequel that posits how Dan and Ben originally met: in a school run by demons for the sake of the elemental manifestation of suffering that resides in Hell, which turns out to be the case for every other school also. Dan and Ben are joined on their first adventure by Laura, who likes shooting at wildlife and looking behind waterfalls for artifacts, and Jayce (or "JC" or "Jay-cee" or however you wish to pronounce his name) who is much more partial to going through vents in bathrooms and reorganizing his inventory every five minutes. There's a few minor branches here and there - despite any attempts to follow the "paths" of the other characters, Ben is Dan's true and canonical partner-in-crime - but it's largely an excuse to make a few referential jokes and kick people in the balls. Or bollocks, as we like to say around these parts. These bollock parts.

I was a little wary about reviewing this along with everything else this month, mostly because people are going to be yelling at me for spamming the game-specific forums with all this insightful video game critique, but partly because there's not a whole lot of substance here and there was never meant to be. I think a pervading theme of Lair of the Clockwork God and its particular split-focus on adventure gaming and "Indie platformer" is how much Indie games have changed since the original Ben & Dan adventures - though, honestly, that sphere has long evolved past puzzle-platformers as well and is squarely in the realm of roguelites and VNs these days. Devil's Kiss may have been a way to address the recent surge of the latter, though it's not so much a love letter to this booming Japanese export than a begrudging (or entirely mocking) acknowledgement of its popularity. Either way, it was 20 minutes of clicking through dumb joke dialogue, and that's a good enough time for me.

GOTY Verdict: I don't think it'll make my top-ten list, but the genuine commercial product it was attached to certainly might.

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